1868 A Strange Christmas Game by Mrs. J. H. Riddell The Broadway Annual

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When, through the death of a distant relative, I, John Lester,
succeeded to the Martingdale Estate, there could not have been found
in the length and breadth of England a happier pair than myself and
my only sister Clare.

We were not such utter hypocrites as to affect sorrow for the loss
of our kinsman, Paul Lester, a man we had never seen, of whom we
had heard but little, and that little unfavourable, at whose hands we
had never received a single benefit—who was, in short, as great a
stranger to ns as the then Prime Minister, the Emperor of Russia,
or any other human being utterly removed from our extremely humble
sphere of life.

His loss was very certainly our gain. His death represented to us,
not a dreary parting from one long loved and highly honoured, but the
accession of lands, houses, consideration, wealth, to myself—John
Lester, Esquire, Martingdale, Bedfordshire: whilom, Jack Lester,
artist and second-floor lodger at 32, Great Smith Street, Bloomsbury.

Not that Martingdale was much of an estate as county properties go.
The Lesters who had succeeded to that domain from time to time during
the course of a few hundred years, could by no stretch of courtesy have
been called prudent men. In regard of their posterity they were,
indeed, scarcely honest, for they parted with manors and farms, with
common rights and advowsons, in a manner at once so baronial and so
unbus iness-like, that Martingdale at length in the hands of Jeremy
Lester, the last resident owner, melted to a mere little dot in the map
of Bedfordshire.

Concerning this Jeremy Lester there was a mystery. No man
could say what had become of him. He was in the oak parlour at
Martingdale one Christmas-eve, and before the next morning he had
disappeared—to reappear in the flesh no more.

Over night, one Mr. Warley, a great friend and boon companion of
Jeremy’s, had sat playing cards with him until after twelve o’clock
chimed, then he took leave of his host and rode home under the
moonlight. After that, no person, as far as could be ascertained, ever
saw Jeremy Lester alive.

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His ways of life had not been either the most regular, or the most
respectable, and it was not until a new year had come in without any
tidings of his whereabouts reaching the house, that his servants
became seriously alarmed concerning his absence.

Then inquiries were set on foot concerning him—inquiries which
grew more urgent as weeks and months passed by without the
slightest clue being obtained as to his whereabouts. Rewards were
offered, advertisements inserted, but still Jeremy made no sign; and so
in course of time the heir-at-law, Paul Lester, took possession of the
house, and went down to spend the summer months at Martingdale with
his rich wife, and her four children by a first husband. Paul Lester
was a barrister—an over-worked barrister, who, every one supposed
would be glad enough to leave the bar and settle at Martingdale, where
his wife’s money and the fortune he had accumulated could not have
failed to give him a good standing even among the neighbouring
county families; and perhaps it was with some such intention that he
went down into Bedfordshire.

If this were so, however, he speedily changed his mind, for with the
January snows he returned to London, let off the land surrounding the
house, shut up the Hall, put in a care-taker, and never troubled
himself further about his ancestral seat.

Time went on, and people began to say the house was haunted,
that Paul Lester had “ seen something,” and so forth—all which stories
were duly repeated for our benefit, when, forty-one years alter the
disappearance of Jeremy Lester, Clare and I went down to inspect our
inheritance.

I say “ our,” because Clare had stuck bravely to me in poverty—
grinding poverty, and prosperity was not going to part us now. What
was mine was hers, and that she knew, God bless her, without my
needing to tell her so.

The transition from rigid economy to comparative wealth, was in
our case the more delightful also, because we had not in the least degree
anticipated it. We never expected Paul Lester’s shoes to come to us,
and accordingly it was not upon our consciences that we had ever in
our dreariest moods wished him dead.

Had he made a will, no doubt we never should have gone to
Martingdale, and I, consequently, never written this story; but, luckily
Sot us, he died intestate, and the Bedfordshire property came to me.

As for his fortune, he had spent it in travelling, and in giving great
entertainments at his grand house in Portman Square. Concerning

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his effects, Mrs. Lester and I came to a very amicable arrangement, and
she did me the honour of inviting me to call upon her occasionally, and,
as I heard, spoke of me as a very worthy and presentable yonng man
“for my station,” which, of coarse, coming from so good an authority,
was gratifying. Moreover, she asked me if I intended residing at Mar*
tingdale, and on my replying in the affirmative, hoped I should like it.

It struck me at the time that there was a certain significance in her
tone, and when I went down to Martingdale and heard the absurd
stories which were afloat concerning the house being haunted, I felt
confident that if Mrs. Lester had hoped much, she feared more.

People said Mr. Jeremy “ walked ” at Martingdale. He had been
seen, it was averred, by poachers, by gamekeepers, by children who
had come to use the park as a near cut to school, by lovers who
kept their tryst under the elms and beeches.

As for the care-taker and his wife, the third in residence since
Jeremy Lester’s disappearance, the man gravely shook his head when
questioned, while the woman stated that wild horses, or even wealth
untold, should not draw her into the red bed-room, nor into the oak
parlour, after dark.

“ I have heard my mother tell, sir—it was her as followed old Mrs.
Reynolds, the first care-taker—how there were things went on in those
self same rooms as might make any Christian’s hair stand on end. Such
stamping, and swearing, and knocking about of furniture; and then
tramp, tramp, up tbe great staircase, and along the corridor and so
into the red bed-room, and then bang, and tramp, tramp again. They
do say, sir, Mr. Paul Lester met him once, and from that time the oak
parlour has never been opened. I never was inside it myself.”

Upon hearing which fact, the first thing I did was to proceed to the
oak parlour, open the shutters, and let the August sun stream in upon
the haunted chamber. It was an old-fashioned, plainly furnished
apartment, with a large table in the centre, a smaller in a recess by
the fire-place, chairs ranged against the walls, and a dusty moth-eaten
carpet on the floor. There were dogs on the hearth, broken and rusty;
there was a brass fender, tarnished and battered; a picture of some
sea-fight over the mantel-piece, while another work of art about equal in
merit hung between the windows. Altogether, an utterly prosaic and
yet not uncheerful apartment, from out of which the ghosts flitted as
soon as daylight was let into it, and which I proposed, as soon as I
“felt my feet,” to re-decorate, re-fumish, and convert into a pleasant
morning-room. I was still under thirty, but I had learned prudence in

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that very good school, Necessity; and it was not my intention to spend
much money until I ascertained for certain what were the actual revenues
derivable from the lands still belonging to the Martingdale estates, and
the charges upon them. In fact, I wanted to know what I was worth
before committing myself to any great extravagance, and the place
had for so long a time been neglected, that I experienced some difficulty
in arriving at the state of my real income.

But in the meanwhile, Clare and I found great enjoyment in explor¬
ing every nook and corner of our domain, in turning over the contents
of old chests and cupboards, in examining the faces of our ancestors
looking down on us from the walls, in walking through the neglected
gardens, full of weeds, overgrown with shruhs and birdweed, where the
boxwood was eighteen inches high, and the shoots of the rose-trees
yards long. I have put the place in order since then, there is no
grass on the paths, there are no trailing brambles over the ground, the
hedges have been cut and trimmed, and the trees pruned, and the box¬
wood clipped; but I often say now-a-days that spite of all my
improvements, or rather in consequence of them, Martingdale does not
look one half so pretty as it did in its pristine state of uncivilized
picturesqueness.

Although 1 determined not to commence repairing and decorating
the house till better informed concerning the rental of Martingdale, still
the Btate of my finances was so far satisfactory that Clare and I decided on
going abroad and take our long-talked-of holiday before the fine weather
was past. We could not tell what a year might bring forth, as Clare
sagely remarked; it was wise to take our pleasure while we could; and
accordingly, before the end of August arrived we were wandering about
the continent, loitering at Rouen, visiting the galleries in Paris, and
talking of extending our one month of enjoyment to three. What
decided me on this course was the circumstance of our becoming
acquainted with an English family who intended wintering in Borne.
We met accidentally, hut discovering we were near neighbours in
England—in fact, that Mr. Cronson’s property lay close beside Marting¬
dale—the slight acquaintance soon ripened into intimacy, and ere long
we were travelling in company.

From the first, Clare did not much like this arrangement. There was
“ a little girl ” in England she wanted me to marry, and Mr. Cronson
had a daughter who certainly was both handsome and attractive. The
little girl had not despised John Lester, artist, while Miss Cronson
indisputably set her cap at John Lester of Martingdale, and would have

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turned away her pretty face from a poor man’s admiring gaze—all this
I can see plainly enongh now, bnt I was blind then and should have
proposed for Marybel—that was her name—before the winter was
over, had news not suddenly arrived of the illness of Mrs. Cronson,
senior. In a moment the programme was changed ; our pleasant days
of foreign travel were at an end. The Cronsons packed up and departed,
while Clare and I returned more slowly to England, a little out of
humour, it must be confessed, with each other.

It was the middle of November when we arrived at Martingdale, and
found the place anything but romantic or pleasant. The walks were
wet and sodden, the trees were leafless, there were no flowers save a
few late pink roses blooming in the garden.

It had been a wet season, and the place looked miserable. Clare
would not ask Alice down to keep her company in the winter months,
as she had intended; and for myself, the Cronsons were still absent
in Norfolk, where they meant to spend Christmas with old Mrs.
Cronson, now recovered.

Altogether, Martingdale seemed dreary enough, and the ghost
stories we had laughed at while sunshine flooded the rooms, became
less unreal, when we had nothing but blazing fires and wax candles
to dispel the gloom. They became more real also when servant after
servant left us to seek situations elsewhere; when “noises” grew
freqnent in the house; when we ourselves, Clare and I, with our own
ears heard the tramp, tramp, the banging and the clattering which
had been described to us.

My dear reader, you doubtless are utterly free from superstitious fan*
cies. You pooh-pooh the existence of ghosts, and “ only wish you could
find a haunted house in which to spend a night,” which is all very brave
and praiseworthy, but wait till you are left in a dreary, desolate old
country mansion, filled with the most unaccountable sounds, without
a servant, with no one save an old care-taker and his wife, who, living
at the extremest end of the building, heard nothing of the tramp,
tramp, bang, bang, going on at all hours of the night.

At first I imagined the noises were produced by some evil-disposed
persons, who wished, for purposes of their own, to keep the house
uninhabited; but by degrees Clare and I came to the conclusion the
visitation must be supernatural, and Martingdale by consequence
untenantable. Still being practical people, and unlike our prede¬
cessors, not having money to live where and how we liked, we decided
to watch and see whether we could trace any human influence in the

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matter. If not, it was agreed we were to pull down the right wing
of the house and the principal staircase.

For nights and nights we sat up till two or three o’clock in the
morning, Clare engaged in needlework, I reading, with a revolver
lying on the table beside me; bnt nothing, neither sound nor appear-
anoe rewarded our vigil.

This confirmed my first idea that the sounds were not supernatural;
but just to test the matter, I determined on Christmas-eve, the anni¬
versary of Mr. Jeremy Lester’s disappearance, to keep watch by
myself in the red bed-chamber. Even to Clare I never mentioned my
intention.

About ten, tired out with our previous vigils, we each retired to
rest. Somewhat ostentatiously, perhaps, I noisily shut the door of
my room, and when I opened it half-an-hour afterwards, no mouse
could have pursued its way along the corridor with greater silence
and caution than myself.

Quite in the dark I sat in the red room. For over an hour I
might as well have been in my grave for anything I could see
in the apartment; but at the end of that time the moon rose and
cast strange lights across the floor and upon the wall of the haunted
chamber.

Hitherto I had kept my watch opposite the window, now I
changed my place to a corner near the door, where I was shaded
from observation by the heavy hangings of the bed, and an antique
wardrobe.

Still I sat on, but still no sound broke the silence. I was weary
with many nights’ watching, and tired of my solitary vigil, I dropped
at last into a slumber from which I was awakened by hearing the door
softly opened.

“John,” said my sister, almost in a whisper; “John, are yon
here ?”

“ Yes, Clare,” I answered; “ but what are you doing up at this
hour?”

“ Come downstairs,” she replied; “ they are in the oak parlour.”

I did not need any explanation as to whom she meant, but crept
downstairs after her, warned by an uplifted hand of the necessity for
silence and caution.

By the door—by the open door of the oak parlour, she paused,
and we both looked in.

There was the room we left in darkness overnight, with a bright

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'wood fire Haring on the hearth, candles on the chimney-piece, the
small table palled oat from its accustomed corner, and two men
seated beside it, playing at cribbage.

We could see the face of the younger player; it was that of a
man of about five-and-twenty, of a man who had lived hard and
wickedly; who had wasted his substance and his health; who had
been while in the flesh Jeremy Lester. It would be difficult for me to
say how I knew this, how in a moment I identified the features of the
player with those of tho man who had been missing for forty-one
years—forty-one years that very night. He was dressed in the
costume of a byegone period; his hair was powdered, and round his
wrists there were ruffles of lace.

He looked like one who, having come from some great party, had
sat down after his return home to play at cards with an intimate
friend. On his little finger there sparkled a ring, in the front of
his shirt there gleamed a valuable diamond. There were diamond
buckles in his shoes, and, according to the fashion of his time, he
wore knee-breeclies and silk stockings, which showed off advan¬
tageously the shape of a remarkably good leg and ankle.

He sat opposite to the door, but never once lifted his eyes
to it. His attention seemed concentrated on the cards.

For a time there was utter silence in the room, broken only by the
momentous counting of the game.

In the doorway we stood, holding onr breath, terrified and yet
fascinated by the scene which was being acted before ns.

The ashes dropped on the hearth softly and like the snow; we
could hear the rustle of the cards as they were dealt out and fell
upon the table; we listened to the count—fifteen-one, fifteen-two, and
so forth,—but there was no other word spoken till at length the player,
whose face we could not see, exclaimed, “ I win; the game is mine.”

Then his opponent took up the cards, sorted them over negligently
in his hand, put them dose together, and flung the whole pack
in his guest’s face, exclaiming, “ Cheat; liar; take that.”

There was a bustle and confusion—a flinging over of chairs, and
fierce gesticulation, and such a noise of passionate voices mingling,
that we could not hear a sentence which was uttered.

All at once, however, Jeremy Lester strode out of the room in
so great a hurry that he almost touched us where we stood; out of the
room, and tramp, tramp up the staircase to the red room, whence ho
descended in a few minutes with a couple of rapiers under bis arm.

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When he re-entered the room he gave, as it seemed to ns, the other
man his choice of the weapons, and then he flung open the window,
and after ceremoniously giving place for hia opponent to pass oat
first, he walked forth into the night-air, Clare and I following.

We went through the garden and down a narrow winding walk to
a smooth piece of turf sheltered from the north by a plantation of young
fir-trees. It was a bright moonlight night by thin time, and we could
distinctly see Jeremy Lester measuring off the ground.

“ When you say 4 three,’ ” he said at last to the man whose back
was still towards us. They had drawn lots for the ground, and the lot
had fallen against Mr. Lester. He stood thus with thp moonbeams
f allin g full upon him, and a handsomer fellow I would never desire to
behold.

44 One,” began the other; 44 two,” and before our kinsman had the
slightest suspicion of his design, he was upon him, and his rapier through
Jeremy Lester’s breast. At the sight of that cowardly treachery, Clare
screamed aloud. In a moment the combatants had disappeared, the
moon was obscured behind a cloud, and we were standing in the
shadow of the fir-plantation, shivering with cold and terror.

But we knew at last what had become of the late owner of Marting-
dale, that he had fallen, not in fair fight, but foully murdered by a false
friend.

When late on Christmas morning I awoke, it was to see a white
world, to behold the ground, and trees, and shrubs all laden and
covered with snow. There was snow everywhere, such snow as no
person could remember having fallen for forty-one years.

44 It was on just such a Christmas as *hi« that Mr. Jeremy dis¬
appeared,” remarked the old sexton to my sister who had insisted on
dragging me through the snow to church, whereupon Clare fainted
away and was carried into the vestry, where I made a full confession
to the Vicar of all we had beheld the previous night.

At first that worthy individual rather inclined to treat the matter
lightly, but when, a fortnight after, the snow melted away and the
fir-plantation came to be examined, he confessed there might be
more things in heaven and earth than his limited philosophy had
dreamed of.

In a little clear space just within the plantation, Jeremy Lester’s
body was found. We knew it by the ring and the diamond buckles,
and the sparkling breast-pin; and Mr. Cronson, who in his capacity as

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magistrate came over to inspect these relics, was visibly perturbed at
my narrative.

“ Pray, Mr. Lester, did you in your dream see the face of—of the
gentleman—your kinsman’s opponent ?”

“ No,” I answered, “ he sat and stood with his back to us all the
time.”

“ There is nothing more, of course, to be done in the matter,”
observed Mr. Cronson.

“Nothing,” I replied; and there the affair would doubtless have termi¬
nated, but that a few days afterwards when we were dining at Cronson
Park, Clare all of a sudden dropped the glass of water she was carrying
to her lips, and exclaiming, “ Look, John, there he is!” rose from her
seat, and with a face as white as the table-cloth, pointed to a portrait
hanging on the wall.

“ I saw him for an instant when he turned his head towards the
door as Jeremy Lester left it,” she explained; “ that is he.”

Of what followed after this identification I have only the vaguest
recollection. Servants rushed hither and thither; Mrs. Cronson
dropped off her chair into hysterics; the young ladies gathered round
their mamma; Mr. Cronson, trembling like one in an ague fit, at¬
tempted Borne kind of an explanation, while Clare kept praying to be
taken away—only to be taken away.

I took her away, not merely from Cronsop Park but from Martingdale.
Before we left the latter place, however, I had an interview with Mr.
Cronson, who said the portrait Clare had identified was that of his
wife’s father, the last person who saw Jeremy Lester alive.

“He is an old man now,” finished Mr. Cronson, “a man of over
eighty, who has confessed everything to me. You won’t bring further
sorrow and disgrace upon us by making this matter public ?”

I promised him I would keep silence, but the story gradually oozed
out, and the Cronsons left the country.

My sister never returned to Martingdale; she xnarrried and is living
in London. Though I assure her there are no strange noises now in
my house, she will not visit Bedfordshire, where the “ little girl ”
she wanted me so long ago to “ think of seriously,” is now my wife and
the mother of my children.

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